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fivemackhttp://www.tridentenergy.co.uk/index.php
I don't quite understand how what these people are trying to do makes any kind of sense at all; their Web site looks like the write-up of a good A-level design technology project, and says in pieces dated February that they're about to start the test that clearly just failed to start in mid-September. The design seems to have a single guidance bearing taking all the sideways force of North Sea waves, held up on a remarkably flimsy-looking tower, and their prototype is made of eighty tons of steel and using four quite complicated linear generators to generate twenty measly kilowatts. I admit that I was slightly surprised that any marine engineers were involved in the endeavour at all.
What have I missed?
I'm sure it's unfair to compare the cost of tidal equipment to that of wind or solar; there's been, what, three orders of magnitude more money available for optimising wind and solar. But I can't help feeling there's a conclusion to draw from the fact that almost every story I read about wave power involves a wave-power demonstration, set up by a small company and producing less power than the smallest wind turbine Vestas will deign to sell, being destroyed by the wrath of Poseidon.
I don't quite understand how what these people are trying to do makes any kind of sense at all; their Web site looks like the write-up of a good A-level design technology project, and says in pieces dated February that they're about to start the test that clearly just failed to start in mid-September. The design seems to have a single guidance bearing taking all the sideways force of North Sea waves, held up on a remarkably flimsy-looking tower, and their prototype is made of eighty tons of steel and using four quite complicated linear generators to generate twenty measly kilowatts. I admit that I was slightly surprised that any marine engineers were involved in the endeavour at all.
What have I missed?
I'm sure it's unfair to compare the cost of tidal equipment to that of wind or solar; there's been, what, three orders of magnitude more money available for optimising wind and solar. But I can't help feeling there's a conclusion to draw from the fact that almost every story I read about wave power involves a wave-power demonstration, set up by a small company and producing less power than the smallest wind turbine Vestas will deign to sell, being destroyed by the wrath of Poseidon.
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Date: 2009-09-23 05:27 pm (UTC)I work in the same office as the people who deal commercially with a non-trivial proportion of the gas that flows in through said pipe. From potentially inaccurate memory, I think the pipeline is a little bigger than you suggest. Not an order of magnitude, but bigger all the same. I suppose this makes the technical achievement marginally bigger still.
Desert solar power: my issue with that is that of transmission losses, which are non-trivial already even within the UK, hence why people sometimes talk about local generation and being off the grid. Are there order-of-magnitude improvements to be made in minimising transmission losses through using better conductors, or do better conductors require cooling to an extent which is impractical?
Unrelatedly, do you have any bright ideas where would you look for a price assessment for UK power in 2013? (Say calendar year 2013, baseload.) All the obvious sources I can think of are either non-trivially non-free or stop in 2012. Part of the reason why nobody wants to quote, I would guess, is that nobody specifically knows what the EU ETS environment in Phase III is going to be like, though we can guess. Nord Pool quotes a price for 2013 vintage EUAs but people don't trade in the market in practice.